The head belongs where the heart is
“Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all…”
– George Washington 9/17/1796
Thus spake America’s inaugural president, whispering into his nation’s ear as he tripped off to his retirement home and golf course in Mount Vernon. Yet, beneath the injunction’s placid overlay were subtle but unmistakable allusions to conflict, security and the girding of loins, conditions under which speaking softly would not substitute for the carrying of a big stick; but then what does one expect to hear from soldiers unlikely to be confused with Mohandas Gandhi.
Still, the noble warrior’s sermon was hardly menacing given its plea to repudiate hatred, its promotion of liberty and justice, its dream of tranquility, its (sadly ironic) rejection of slavery. With wisdom perhaps before its time, the call astutely railed against rote and unreflective policies foreign or domestic, shunned unstudied alliances benign or belligerent, disavowed mindless cozy or conflicted deals unsatisfying to anybody but a select few. Impulsive or reactive affiliations, he seemed to be saying, are bound eventually to be the choking chains that cripple, waste time and resources and stall a nation’s maturation.
And face it, the president’s peace, order and good government wasn’t going to have an easy time of it and, one suspects, old George didn’t figure it would be a smooth ride; rather something in need of hard work.
Well that was years and a lot of war wounds ago, and since then national and international testosterone has flowed, national and international wars have been mongered, sabres have been rattled, swashes have been buckled and human frailty’s been illumined by the rocket’s red glare across the western sky.
One would like to think that our home and native land might learn something from all this, that the 150-year-old birthday girl might look over her southern fence and calmly assess her own powers, potentials and problems long circumstantially linked to the neighbours by culture, economics and blood; mindful of their trials yet resistant to their solutions. No sense everybody acting the idiot.
A week from now, midst flags, festivals and feelin’ good, the country will bask in the usual mythology of innate benevolence, gallant modesty and selfeffacement without seriously wondering whether our ambiguous place in the universe is enhanced by burgeoning hard-power bravado, by the size of a supersonic armada, by the number of citizens that can be persuaded into helmets and flack jackets.
If George Washington’s preachment means anything to Canada – now or ever – it’s surely that process beats product and the process is cultivation, that intelligence and diligence be marshalled in the struggle for good faith, restorative justice, healing, reconciliation and understanding… and, while we’re at it, to think about fostering amity between the country’s east and west, between Halifax and Dartmouth, between Stellarton and New Glasgow, between me and my insurance man.
While burgers are flipping next Saturday, consider with Washington the proposition that nations and states and communities and individuals can’t possibly benefit when the heedlessly accept, as normal animal behaviour, conditions of violence or dishonesty or arrogance or jealousy; or when friendliness is taken for granted as an inevitable part of the human furniture needing no attention, no maintenance, no examination.
There’s a yarn, told a couple of times in holy writ, about the old girl who kept bugging Jesus to fix her daughter’s dementia. For reason’s best understood by himself, he was reluctant… something to do with lost sheep of the house of Israel. In any event, she kept at him, determined that, if Jesus was going to do anything else for the rest of the day, he was going to solve the girl’s problem. The mother was clearly driven by faith, not one she idly presumed by one she worked at, stirring it up and showing it to the point of making a real pest of herself, not unlike the peaceniks of the Voice of Women, or the Rideau Institute, faith she would nurture.
Healing and wholeness, civility and amicable human relations are out there to be had – if they’re promoted and sweated over, often to exasperation.
General George may have read the book.